Land of Pictures 19
Sitemap Picture Commentary Continued PAGE 19 : 'YET EVEN More' Awesome Pictures (very best part of this wiki) So the problem is how do you show Art Deco building styling and detailing when you are effectively inside a maze of tunnels (outside building external views were far away, murky and basic, as they would be). SO they made a big open cavern (and far too large windows for one wall of it), big enough to put multistory building facings within (there were BIG volumes in other places). An idea for the MMORPG would be to have many stretches of more mundane 'Streets' criss-crossing the City, with building facings (3 story) on both sides, multi leveled sidewalks, a center tram/bicycle path for transportation, and some skylight style roofing (where you could see adjacent taller buildings in the ocean blackness). Such 'Streets' would make Rapture seem more like a city than an underground tunnel complex. At least in one direction you could SEE distance. I've figured you could have a couple of miles of such 'streets' in Rapture (given a 20000 inhabitant population) for lower density residences,shopping and manufacturing(which there would be MANY small establishments of). The 'street' structure would also be modular/prefab to lower its construction costs significantly. Easy enough to generate some of that 'modern' art you saw various places in BioShock. This actually IS a warped, real, famous Painting given a 'Photoshop' do over. Looks bad enough to have hung in one of those art galleries in Dionysus Park, no ? I haven't come up with an appropriately pretentious Title for it (Which would be an amusing feature to have in the MMORPG where player created art would be legion). This is a REAL Zeppelin. Its Huge and really doesn't carry that much - you COULD NOT have supplied the city with anything like this. How the hell do you dock something like this (or worse several of them) to Columbia with the constant danger of CRASHING and TEARING and BURNING ??? So LOOK into the future and you see NO MORE airships and instead Planes replacing them. Zeppelin on the Brain unfortunately ruled the game developers minds. (Which would have been OK if the whole story turned out to be Booker's deranged Dream as it should have been). Another example of something closer to what the Trams in Rapture SHOULD have looked like (instead of that bizarre design they created). THIS is from the Dayton Flood of 1913. So it is actually antiquated by the time Rapture started, so there was plenty of available *more* realistic ideas for the game artist (who I think was attempting to make the game Trams be styled like bathyspheres and pretty much botched it). BTW - that thing that looks like a bedframe leaned against the front is actually a safety device/appliance designed to scoop up a person before the Tramcar ran them over (it had trigger bars and was spring loaded). Such things were a major consideration even by 1913 for something which has to run in public streets. The rocket thing in Infinite BS made no sense whatsoever (except the intention to somehow make the story 'Bioshock' (Light House...) when it really had little to do with it all ... milking the brand - quite pathetic). Its just some 'neat' scene they cooked up, no matter how illogical it would be for the setting (or for Law of Physics, or for the Setting .... "what can we come up with to get Booker to Columbia ... A TORNADO !!!! No thats been done before. A Nazi Submarine !!!! No, it has to be something to link it to Bioshock .... I KNOW --- A LIGHTHOUSE !!!! But how....??? LETS MAKE THE LIGHTHOUSE A ROCKET !!!!! YEAH THAT WOULD BE COOL !!!!!!!!!!). I substitute : So after being administered a hallucinogenic (slipped into his booze) by the Lutece Gang, Booker sees all kinds of weirdness and delusions as he took on his task of kidnapping Elizabeth from that mountaintop resort, to subsequently hold her for ransom from the rich Comstock family. A daring insertion via aircraft was one of the hallmarks of the Lutece Gang. Another was the "Secret Quantum' scam, where they 'stung' several foreign governments (independently) for millions of dollars by employing a few rather simple conjurer's tricks and some fast talking. Real skyline. Note a few tall buildings and a majority far shorter. The World (and various governments) would have closely looked at Columbia. Once something is known to be possible, people WILL figure it out (or STEAL technology directly). Facing 1000X as many geniuses and money and resources, Columbia quickly would find itself an antiquated joke in any real world story. So Comstock flying about stealing things in his 'pirate' city would soon have the Worlds Powers (most of all the US Government) after him in something like THIS. Real pneumo canister (8 inch diameter, which was larger than used on most systems). Around the turn of the century there were over a dozen large cities with large systems (usually for MAIL transported BETWEEN post offices, or from telegraph centers to post system). Columbia coulda had a Pneumo system (one system in London was operational in 1850s, so the technology was already 'mature). But ooops... Columbia is all separate floaty pieces/chunkies, so sorry 'no go' with that. How 'bout them telephony wires ??? Hmm, same problem. Just really not a good design those Infinite game makers came up with for a "City". Transportation WORTHY of being in a Flying City (Columbia is more like a town anyway - perhaps this is like what Andrew Carnegie would have in HIS Flying City ...) THIS looks like it is actually something that could work, and in a quite nice massively verticalized cityscape (in a style/construction technologies concurrent with Columbia's initial existence). Not something made by game designers who were ready and able to ignore the basics of engineering and even simple Physical Laws in their strange little "Politically Correct" rendition of American . Unfortunately, whipping about rapidly, shooting at things in some big cityscape DOESN'T appear to be what THIS creation is designed for (what matter when Infinite BS eventually severely limited that aspect of the game -- so you might as well have had a far more realistic system substituted). Oops, bad planning, wasted money and time, and a looming and missed release deadline meant they were stuck with a mess of problematic/half-baked things (assuming they actually cared). Sad. "Bring us the Thing and wipe away your debts". Apparently being a dimensional 'god' and absorbing so many pan-dimensional versions of yourself isn't the nicest thing to happen. Booker probably would have been given a club and a sack (and maybe a vomit bag) by the Luteces for his mission. Splicers became obsessed with masks after things in Rapture fell apart. Here is a right dandy one that a Splicer worked on for 5 years to make and fix up so wonderfully, but only in time to meet his demise at the hands of A Big Daddy known as "Subject Delta" who rampaged across the southern part of the city just before Sofia Lamb disappeared. Another Rapture Reborn ™ MMORPG Player created/customizable Asset (the usual type of Avatar appearance mods most MMORPGs usually have as a feature). When I first saw this, I didn't pay much attention as it really didn't look like any radio I've ever seen. Then after cleaning THIS picture up and looking closely - IT looks like actually it was ORIGINALLY an alternate/rejected Audio-Diary device game prop (which then was recycled, mod'd a small bit and then used for the "Radio" you grab in the Bathysphere). The mechanism looks like a pair of reels/spools for either a magnetic tape or wire, and a recording/read head alignment capstan/guide mechanism between those. Then it has audio speaker, knobs, lights, etc... Those 4 rectangular things across the top even look shaped like the typical recorder mode buttons for forward/rewind/play/record ... The picture shows it sitting in a holding cradle (that lower fourth, with the sign) which isn't part of the 'Radio'. More Streamlining (an American and English high-speed locomotives from the 30s) . Efficiency was already becoming a factor. Would be doubly true for anything that had to move submerged in water. And to think we coulda had Nazis in Columbia if they had really tried !!! Not just those lame-assed turn of the century canon-fodder which Booker guns down by the hundreds. I'm sure some Nazi stuff could be included in the Rapture MMORPG (don't forget the secret Arctic base the Nazis allegedly had ...) Reminds me of a setting from the Atlantic Express Depot in the BioShock 2 game (minus the guys actually working on the AE Traincar). Streamlining was all the rage the decade and a half before Rapture started. (A Museum in Britain) Another Art Deco design. Radio made out of Bakelite (a thermosetting phenol formaldehyde resin) - an early plastic ( a material which could be used in Rapture for small manufacturing). Lots of potential for props in the MMORPG, and you don't even have to do much original design for much of it (which to do right/good IS actually hard ...). A smoking flying horse. *THIS* could have been better than that "Parrot in a Gimp Suit" they finally used. Peacock ---> Flying Horse (the logic escapes me) Note - I didn't add the cigarette in the horses mouth ... The Sins of The Stupid : Aunty Elizabeth's Flying HELL (proposed Infinite BS DLC). Now we will never know... (but imagine the hellhole Columbia could have turned under in ITS future). Early 1930s (Pan Am) Flying boat. Shouldn't something like THIS have been the longer ranged flying vehicles of Columbia 1912 (only a little stealing of design from the future, after all the other things we saw there). Zeppelin_On_The_Brain Nose structure of the (real) Hindenburg - the point where all the girders converged and where the 'mast' docking mechanism was fastened. The problem with lighter-than-air ships was their huge surfaces which made them blow about in even minor wind conditions. Another important reason to ditch the 'Zeppelin' look when the story's quantum floaty fantasy made the balloon part of the vehicle irrelevant. "Zeppelin On The Brain" (I hear Lobotomy can cure that ).